Bite Your Tongue
by dismaynight
Summary: Honor and respect have nothing to do with it, like teaching a little girl to play nice after getting sucker-punched in the face by a boy; because boys can never get that strong in less than three seconds. Hell hath no fury / SLIGHTInoxItachi


She wasn't raised on the idea that women bite their tongues when the men talk. She wasn't raised on the belief that _when_ men talk, women must bite their tongues and let them. She wasn't raised on the rule that when the man talks, who is, keep in mind child, the head of the household, women should bite their sharp tongues and listen well.

Nobody ever told her, "_You worthless piece of trash -- you will LISTEN when a man like me speaks to a slut like you! Bite your tongue, bit--"_ Nobody ever warned her, "_When he talks, pay him respect and bite your tongue, it's the honorable thing to do -- no matter what he says that may piss you off."_

Never was she punished for talking back to a male elder, never was she slapped for speaking spitefully to her male captor, never was she kicked in the back of the thigh for stating boldly what she believed in to the male enemy who held disdain to her beliefs (mainly because her beliefs did not encompass any sort of tongue biting in any shape or form.)

Basically, she has never bitten her tongue in her life.

She has never ceased in opening her big mouth in the presence of men, no matter what came out of it.

Some days, she was just one of the boys -- which made sense, as she was stuck on a team with two people of the male variety -- playing tag with them in the mud and laughing when some of the gunk got in her mouth, pushing them around as if she owned them, hanging off of their shoulders and last nerves with a toothy grin and barking laugh. Some days, she was boy-crazy; not afraid to suck up to a certain raven-haired mystery while stomping on his wit and respectful nature at the same time, never afraid to prance in revealing purple ensembles in front of two definitely male boys who couldn't care about respect enough to keep goggling eyes off of her (and, my goodness, in front of her father, too, what a shame), just could not, would not, should not be frightened of gushing over a boy in front of him _and_ his parents (and knowing it, too.) And some days, she hated boys with the fiery passion of the summer sun, to put it lightly; she would kick them in the butt and slap them in the face in the same minute while yelling at them in a highly grate-on-the-ears tone of voice, she liked to knee them in the groin while tugging on their hair as if they were a rag doll, and she _loved_ playing dominatrix with her enemies of the mission before swiftly stabbing them in the throat with a kunai and tossing the body at their comrade with a sadistic twist of the mouth.

Daddy never taught her how to play nice with the boys, because them being mean meant they actually really liked you ( oh no, she had to read that in a book after the raven-haired mystery caught her interest.) She had no siblings to teach her how to handle younger miscreants and older bullies, and instead learned the hard way with sticks and stones… in the literal sense of the phrase. She had no living grandparents to teach her how it was in the past so she could learn to not make social history repeat itself, but had to learn by trial and error -- which is what made her into such a popular girl in the beginning, in an odd, don't-you-ever-do-that-crap-again sort of way. And she never had a mother to teach her to bite her tongue when the men talk.

In fact, she never even learned _that_ lesson on her own.

Sure, she always heard her friends at school talking about how they had been recalling a really embarrassing moment with that one girl and then that hot guy over there walked up and she immediately shut up and blushed sweetly as he began his awkward flirting, and oh my goodness, he was being so cute--! Of course she heard the stories; they were everywhere. It was all her friends would ever talk about: cute boys, mysterious boys, funny boys, dark boys, hyper boys, hot boys, adorable boys, _sexy_ boys -- eventually she just went along with it and learned how cream of the crop girls handled the opposite sex. Eventually she learned what _really_ was the difference between girl and boy, and eventually boy and _man_. Eventually -- she became one of the most popular girls in the Academy, who only ever had her eyes set on the raven-haired mystery, the sole survivor that was just too cool for every girl _not_ to have a crush on.

But what separated her from the rest of the girls, and what made her so popular among the kids, was that she never _shut up_. She never ceased in speaking her mind. She never regretting talking back and flirting with a guy. She never felt any shame for embarrassing herself in front of a guy, because it all just, kind of, worked out for her in the end. She wanted to think it was a special power of hers, or really good luck… or really, _really good_ luck. But when everyone began to grow up, and the stories from her friends about how boys walked all over them and they took it happily grew in number, and the blushes, and the sweet smiles, and the cute little flowers in the hair, all became just normal and typical and expected things from those of the female variety -- well, that's when she realized that something was wrong with her own way of thinking. Because, no matter how hard she scrambled to _eventually_ grow into everything her friends were doing and becoming, she just could not become a doormat.

And that was exactly how she looked at it: the typical girl was a doormat for boys. That's why she fought so much with her pink-haired friend and called her names and toughened her up, even after the time for immaturity had passed -- she wanted to make sure that not all girls were doomed to become doormats. She wanted to make sure that she wasn't a… freak. And then suddenly her pink-haired friend was able to punch through walls, fight beside the boys, and rough herself up while still looking appealing, and it made her smile.

_That _was around the time when her mother finally told her to bite her tongue when spoken to by a man; and around the time when she realized that she was definitely one of the boys, she obviously liked them, and she occasionally hated them, and didn't give a flying flip about any of it. That was also around the time that she stopped talking to her mother.

By the time she was pushed onto an S-rank mission with the role of 'plan-finisher', she was strong, beautiful, confident, and louder than ever -- practically perfect for her role in the assignment. The mission involved the dreaded Akatsuki and luring one of them into interrogation without them knowing it was really an interrogation, and then seducing them into giving Konoha the information they needed. By the time she had this new raven-haired mystery (who reminded her too much of the first) right where she wanted him -- right under her long legs, pretty hands, and smoky eyes -- she realized she was probably -- _most likely_ -- going to die.

"You think you can fool me like _that_?" said the man, hand on her throat and kunai at her bare stomach. "You think that you can fool me at a--"

"Yeah, yeah," she interrupted, dangerous as it was, avoiding the eyes like the mission scroll had told her while still holding an air of confidence. "I guess I couldn't fool you. Whatever -- you can kill me now, hot-shot."

The man glared, and she could feel the blonde hair at the back of her neck stand up at the bite of the kunai, but she still just wasn't afraid. "Learn to bite your tongue, kunoichi, before your own words get it cut off for you." And suddenly her innocence was stolen; too soon after that, so was her consciousness.

When she awoke in the hospital with a pounding headache and a painful _pain_ between the legs, she rolled her eyes and punched the end table beside the bed with a bandaged hand. The nurse told her she suffered from internal bleeding from an… _internal_ wound, and would have died had her teammates not saved her. When she asked if it was one of the female or the male comrades that had gotten her out of there, and the answer was a bewildered, why-does-it-matter "_Both,_" she pounded on her hips and growled at nothing for no specific reason.

After that mission and several painful trips to the bathroom, she was beautiful and confident again -- but with a slightly altered belief.

She wasn't raised on the idea that women bite their tongues when the men talked, but nor was she raised on any other solid type of belief, so it was okay. It was especially okay when her mother hugged her, finally, after she returned home from the hospital (and every time it happened, too.) She was okay when her dad shook his head and told her she was more than a woman, she was a dangerous and thorny red rose. She was also okay when her male friend (and adorable-boy teammate, at that, she really had to admit) told her that she really should have bit her tongue with that guy, because now -- dot-dot-dot. She was okay when she reached his forehead with her chapstick-ed lips and kissed it sweetly, and then proceeded to slap him on the back and laugh as he mumbled about troublesome females.

"Shikamaru," Ino interrupted him with a smirk. "I wasn't raised to bite my tongue for men. I mean, seriously…." And then she told him something that really shouldn't have meant as much as it did to him later on, something that only further proved his theory that women were just plain _troublesome_. She wasn't a freak for thinking it, and she especially was not a freak for telling it to a man. Really, what did it matter, anyways? It wasn't that she had no honor -- she was just one of the boys. And even though she loved them and hated them in the same minute, in the same style and with the same smirk, it didn't make her a tease or a faker or a new brand of slut, or any less of herself. Being loud and obnoxious, confident and beautiful, stunning and powerful; it was just her definition -- she did not define them. Whatever came out of her big mouth was always something she chose not to take back, and was incapable of regretting. It was Ino, and she loved it -- she loved herself, and the boys she was surrounded with. It didn't matter that nobody ever taught her to bite her tongue when the man talks, to shut up when and _when_ the man speaks, to respect the man enough be silent and listen to whatever crap he had to say. It didn't matter that she paid for it sometimes, because even then she took it in stride.

You cannot tell Yamanaka Ino to "Bite your tongue."

She's learned and experienced enough to know better than that:

"When the woman bites her tongue, she bleeds."


End file.
